Humans of Martech 25: Naomi Liu: How to ace your first marketing job
Naomi is Director, Global Marketing Operations at EFI, a 3,000+ person tech company in the printing industry. She’s based in Vancouver but she’s been working remotely long before it was cool. She has 12+ years of experience leading high-performing global B2B demand generation teams.
Before EFI she ran Marketing Ops at Sophos a cybersecurity enterprise company. Naomi is also one of the founding members of “MO-Pros”, the biggest Slack community for marketing Ops pros and recently launched a platform/site.
She’s been interviewed by prominent podcasts for her efforts spearheading a large scale enterprise migration to Marketo. David Lewis, the godfather of marketing ops podcasts says that Naomi is in his top 10 marketing ops people he’s ever worked with.
Noami dives into the 3 things that stand out in most marketing operations profesionals:
- ask a lot of questions and think outside the box
- ability to explain complex technical concept to non tech people
- multi task skills, sometimes the sky is falling
Most marketing job postings should be read as a guideline and not taken as a prescription. The most important thing to demonstrate is your ability to learn something.
When Naomi is hiring on her team she’s looking for a balance between:
- technical chops
- cultural fit
In the interview process, it's key to get to chat with people from other business units to assess that cultural fit.
Take home assignments are not super common for entry level roles, you can get a ton from how someone answers a question.
Naomi values curiosity, looking for data opinions. How do you test that in an interview, what attributes shine?
The attribute that allows you to suceed is you have to be curious and always ask why. You have to be willing to break things down and rebuild it better fast and stronger. Open ended questions get interesting conversations. Let candidates explain problem solving. Look for condidates that demonstrate personal bias recognition.
What's it like being a Director level MOPs at an enterprise company?
Aside from lots of meetings (lol), understand where business partners want to go, can our current tech stack support those goals. Tech adoption, get everyone to use Marketo to most potential.
How can people who want to stay in the IC path develop a long term career growth?
Naomi sets up her team with subject matter experts. Things change too fast, having experts on specific pieces, web, email, data, so they can stay on top of those areas and bring it back to the team and educate the rest, share knowledge.
Here are key elements of Naomi's onboarding strategy:
- Marketo university
- 1-1s with key stakeholders
- Viydyard videos for short training
- Make sure person is plugged in and fits in
- Training the data model, week by week
What should marketers do in their first job:
- always asking questions
- how can we do this better or not
- why do we do this this way
If you're interested in marketing tech and you aren't a member of The MOPros community, you can signup here.